As a young lawyer in the early 1980s, Lorraine Bannai was convinced Fred Korematsu’s civil rights case was about more than just a man who refused to report to an internment camp during World War II. To Bannai and her colleagues, the case was about social justice for all Americans during times of peace as well as conflict.

This theme also informs Bannai’s work as a Seattle University educator today. As a director of its Fred T. Korematsu Center for Law and Equality, she helps lead faculty and researchers trying to empower politically and socially disadvantaged populations.

Since its 2008 inception, the Center, which is based at the Seattle University School of Law,  has launched a project studying ways to combat minority vote dilution and an initiative aimed at improving public defense representation in courts for indigent people accused of misdemeanors. It houses a clinic so law students can gain firsthand experience writing and submitting “friend of the court” briefs in state and federal discrimination cases. Such briefs are authored by people and organizations interested in the outcome of a particular case without being directly involved in it.

The Center is named for Korematsu, a U.S.-born Japanese man who defied government orders to report to an internment camp when, in the hysteria and xenophobia accompanying the 1941 bombing of Pearl Harbor, authorities summarily herded 110,000 Japanese-Americans into the crude, remote camps. Korematsu was arrested and convicted of defying the military order. He challenged the order all the way to the U.S. Supreme Court, which in 1944 upheld his conviction claiming the mass incarceration of people of Japanese ancestry was justified as “military necessity.” He was forced to stay in a camp until the war ended.